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Latest release of systemd includes time-based log rotation

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of the latest version of the open source startup daemon systemd. With version 195, the tool, which is being used by Fedora, openSUSE and several other Linux distributions, has received what Poettering calls a "non-trivial amount of cool new features".

The Journal, the part of systemd that provides global logging functions to the system, has also gained several new options. It now supports time-based rotation of logs (in addition to the already included disk space related rotation), a function that replaces more traditional tools like logrotate. The journalctl utility also has new --since= and --until= switches that let users filter logs by time. The systemd-coredumpctl command lets users easily extract core dumps from the logs.

In addition to these features, several different parts of systemd were improved and options were changed. Poettering points out that to make it easier for users migrating to systems with systemd, the tool now also installs a README file in the traditional /var/log/ and /etc/rc.d/init.d/ directories that explains where the system now keeps its log files and how to access them. A list of all changes in the release is available in the NEWS file for the project.

The source code for systemd 195 is available for download on the Freedesktop.org web site. Publicly accessible Git repositories for the project are also available. According to Poettering, systemd 195 will also be included in Fedora 18 when that is eventually released.